Friday, August 3, 2018

possible near-future crises

I’ve mentioned in several recent posts my belief that it will take a crisis of major proportions to destabilise the regime of the elites.

One interesting possibility is a complete political meltdown in the U.S. after the next presidential election. The meltdown could happen whether Trump wins or loses.

If Trump wins I think we can take it as a certainty that certain forces within the U.S. will simply not accept such a result. A second term for Trump might well push some of these groups over the edge and into attempts at direct action. An actual military coup might not be very likely but it is likely that there will be hysterical liberals openly calling for a coup. In fact some liberals have already made noises that suggest that they think a coup would be a fabulous idea. In Trump wins in 2020 the push for a coup could gain real momentum and even if the military doesn’t act it could precipitate a full-blown political crisis. A government really cannot allow people to be running around openly making plans to overthrow it without taking some action.

It might not be a likely scenario but since the 2016 election the mood among liberals has become steadily more irrational. There has to be a definite chance that another Trump victory would push some liberals into a stance perilously close to outright treason. Things could get interesting.

If Trump loses there’s also the potential for things to get very very crazy. Liberals are consoling themselves at the moment with revenge fantasies. The trouble is that a very significant number of them will expect those fantasies to be made into reality. They will expect Trump supporters to be punished. They will expect the punishments to be severe. They will also expect a newly elected Democrat president to take action to remove the threat of any future unfavourable election results. The backlash that liberals are planning is going to be the most savage repression ever enacted in an allegedly democratic country.

What could this backlash lead to? Probably nothing. Probably Americans will tamely submit to giving up most of their freedoms. But they might not.

And what will the Republicans do? Almost certainly they will welcome the new repressive measures. The chances that the Republican Party will put up a fight are somewhere between zero and none. Of course this might actually cause Republican voters at long last to realise that the Republican Party is not on their side. Which could have interesting results.

We’re seeing something similar in Britain with the elites being increasingly contemptuous of democracy after the British electorate wickedly voted for Brexit. And we’re likely to see similar reactions from European elites if they suffer embarrassing electoral setbacks. The European elites have had just about enough of democracy. They’re increasingly moving towards abandoning even the pretence that democracy still exists.

While it’s certain that the elites in the U.S. and other western countries will move more and more towards open repression the crucial question is whether they will go far enough to be safe. There’s nothing more dangerous than half-hearted repression. That’s what brought about the downfall of the Tsar in Russia in 1917. If the Tsarist regime had been as repressive as its popular image would lead us to believe the regime would have survived. But in fact the regime tried to be moderately repressive. Always a fatal mistake. It will be interesting to see if our modern elites have learnt the lesson of 1917.